2012/2/2 Merlijn van Deen valhallasw@arctus.nl:
Hello All,
As you might know, the mediawiki repository is switching to git. Sumana contacted me to find out whether the pywikipedia community would also be interested in switching.
Possible reasons for switching are mainly related to to developer workflow: it's much easier to make small (local) commits, and we can do things like review-before-merge (even though I don't think this is a large issue). In addition, it's much easier to browse the history, and something like 'svn blame' does not take two decades.
The obvious disadvantage is that people will have to switch: they will have to download new software (git / tortoisegit / whatever), change their repositories, et cetera.
I can remember a discussion about this, but I cannot find it in my mail archives - so I'm guessing this was on IRC.
The outcome was mostly concerns about history, and a bit about infrastructure, since it would have meant moving to bitbucket/github.
(Merlijn knows my background; and where I come from. For others, full disclosure, I used to contribute to Mercurial) I would recommend switching to Mercurial or Git, especially if the Foundation will need review tools / infrastructure for Mediawiki. Whatever process is used to convert the MW repo can be used to convert the pywikipedia repo.
I'm not concerned / do not care about the higher technical level required to learn how to use a DVCS. As those tools are getting more popular, students actually start to use git/mercurial in school; new developers will soon be more familiar with git than with mercurial.
This being said, I'm not active anymore here, so feel free to ignore the old guy :)